


where the days are longer

by endofadream



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Bottom Steve Rogers, Car Sex, Frottage, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Top Bucky Barnes, and a healthy serving of sex, because Bucky totally loves it, shameless classic rock, the road trip fic no one asked for, with a lot of introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-21
Updated: 2016-04-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 13:06:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6611716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endofadream/pseuds/endofadream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And maybe that’s what they’re running from. Those ghosts. That minefield. The suffocating pressure to live up to who they used to be when who they used to be has now become stale, recycled words in textbooks and museums and clickbait online articles. Captain America and Bucky Barnes may be American heroes, relics of a time when patriotism ran deep and values were wholesome, but they are also people who lived and breathed and died to live and breathe again.</p><p>They fuck off to the coast, trying to put as many miles between them and D.C. as possible. New York is loud and claustrophobic at the best of times, but California has the open skies and roads that make Steve ease a little more into his skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the days are longer

**Author's Note:**

> the working title for this was "shameless classic rock insertion fic," and it lives up to its name stupendously. i spent most of the process listening to my [spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/endofadream/playlist/6a3FL7eg3QACp2QLO69P2R) playlist, which i do recommend. to think that this monster came to fruition after i tweeted randomly about steve and bucky driving along the coast while listening to "stone in love," because bucky strikes me as a classic rock kind of guy. title comes from "ventura highway" by america because goddamn do i love america.

They fuck off to the coast, trying to put as many miles between them and D.C. as possible.

Once upon a time, back before the war, Bucky had talked briefly about California, about maybe, someday, going there, like the blood of Brooklyn didn't run deep in their veins, like their bodies weren’t the cracked concrete and the worn brick and the rickety stairwells of their youth. Like they’d ever make enough to stop worrying about next month’s rent, or whether they’d eat, or if Steve would be able to survive another New York winter with only thin blankets, a busted radiator, and Bucky’s shameful warmth.

That was then. Things are different now. They’re different. It’s a fact that Steve is still struggling to come to terms with, if he wants to be honest. That he doesn't wake up in the morning with aching joints, that he can breathe deep and not have to worry about asthma attacks. That his body isn't betraying him, day by day, anymore.

Bucky is the same. Guarded eyes, defensive posture, decades worth of grievances etched into the lines of his face, he is not the boy that Steve grew up with, nor is he the man whose deadly aim and even deadlier calm picked off targets that even the most seasoned officers were impressed by. He is not the man that stretched in trenches wet with sucking mud with Steve and laughed with the Commandos over the crackling heat of a fire: he’s somewhere in between, a new breed, a gray area heavy with ghosts. A minefield that is nearly impossible to navigate.

And maybe that’s what they’re running from. Those ghosts. That minefield. The suffocating pressure to live up to who they used to be when who they used to be has now become stale, recycled words in textbooks and museums and clickbait online articles. Captain America and Bucky Barnes may be American heroes, relics of a time when patriotism ran deep and values were wholesome, but they are also people who lived and breathed and died to live and breathe again.

Trees blur past their window, then fields, then nothing at all. State line blends into state line. Bucky takes the wheel, then Steve. Then Bucky again. No one knows where they are, and it’s more comforting than it has any right to be. Lingering guilt still hangs over the thought of Sam, and maybe Natasha because she gets Bucky in a way that even Steve doesn’t and knows he never will, but he pushes that guilt away, locks it up and doesn’t look back the more the mileage increases.

His phone is back in New York, and Bucky never got one to begin with.

Then: California. Someplace in the heat of it all, desert sand gritty against Steve’s skin when the dry wind blows. He watches Bucky barter in Spanish with the guy selling them a beat-up ’76 Chevrolet Nova SS. He doesn't know much about cars, especially the vintage ones, and neither does Bucky, really, but there’s something about the faded baby-blue paint and the worn cloth interior that draws Steve in and makes him want it like he doesn’t want much else. It’s old and a little rough, like them; maybe that’s why.

Being back still sometimes feels like being in one of those old dime-store sci-fi pulps that Bucky used to read: all the machines and apparatuses that the World’s Fair had tried—and failed—to get right. The neon lights and the cell phones and the televisions that have replaced the radio. Even years later he’s still trying to get used to navigating a world where he feels like a tourist. New York is loud and claustrophobic at the best of times, but California has the open skies and roads that make Steve ease a little more into his skin. And maybe Steve is just done with doing things for other people for once.

The sun is setting behind him and Bucky is still talking to the salesman, gesticulating with that furrow on his brow half-hidden by the dark lenses of his sunglasses. Steve cocks his head, crosses his arms over his chest and leans back against an old Wrangler. The words roll off Bucky’s tongue like he’s been speaking the language his whole life. It’s beautiful, because Bucky is beautiful, but Steve hates thinking about how those languages got there, why Bucky knows Russian and French and Italian and Romanian.

Bucky’s arm glints in the sunlight, bare up to the shoulder. It’s a sharp glint, dangerous, benign for now but vibrating with power, much like the body it’s attached to. Bucky is unshaven, angular jaw dark with the rough beginnings of a beard, and his hair is still too long, pulled up in a loose bun. Steve’s heart still jumps in a familiar but long-gone arrhythmia when Bucky looks his way and smiles.

They get the car, Bucky handing over a thick stack of cash and peeling off before the guy can count it. Steve is almost worried for a second before he decides that he just doesn't care: not when the highway is rumbling under their wheels and Bucky’s fiddling with the radio, eliciting static every other channel or so before he finally picks up Steve Perry crooning, _“Those summer nights are calling, stone in love,”_ and leans back, satisfied.

There it stays as they race across the winding road of the coast, the sun orange-red in the interior of the car, Bucky’s arm up on the door and the fingers of his right hand loose on the steering wheel. His jeans are worn and fraying in places, his gray shirt wrinkled and nearing its second day of wear. His Ray-Bans sit low on his nose, and he cards his fingers through his hair, leaning his head on the hand propped up on the door for a second before straightening back up.

The song wears on, the cloth seats are musty with age and riddled with a few cigarette burns, and Steve has never felt so happy.

Bucky looks over, catches him staring. One corner of his mouth quirks up as he says, “What are you lookin’ at?”

Steve doesn’t need to even think. “You.” He looks out the window at the mountains, their peaks lost in the glare. “Just thinking about…how happy I am.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything, but he does reach across the center console and take Steve’s hand, tangling their fingers and bringing them to the knob of the gearshift. He lets them rest there as Journey fades out and Steve’s left wondering if it’s possible to be this in love.

——

Later, on a cliff overlooking the pinpricked stars of Los Angeles in the valley, the hood of the car cool against Steve’s back, Bucky’s arm cooler still where it brushes Steve’s side. They’re sharing a Lucky Strike, slightly crumpled from being in Bucky’s jacket, the bent box resting on Bucky’s belly. It rises and falls with the steady cadence of his breathing and Steve breathes out with him, smoking pluming in the chilly air. He never smokes, mainly because he hates the things, but it feels right, somehow, doing it out here.

Steve takes another drag and stares up at the stars, lost in thought. He must hold onto the cigarette too long because Bucky is elbowing him, saying, “Quit hogging, mooch,” and sitting up. He reaches over Steve, grabbing for his hand, and before he can second-guess himself Steve is using Bucky’s precarious balance to pull him down, free hand cupping Bucky’s jaw as he kisses him. Tastes smoke and mountain air and the crisp sunshine of California. Wonders, absently, as Bucky lets out a quiet sound and melts against him, if he’s tasting happiness, too.

——

They sleep in the car that night, seats pushed back. Steve wakes with a crick in his neck and Bucky grouses about his shoulder as he starts the engine and flips the visor down to try and block the early-morning sunshine. He’s never been much of a morning person, and Steve opens his mouth, ready to hesitantly say something, when Bucky says, “It’s always you that’s been the morning person,” and looks over.

And Steve nods, biting his lower lip as his heart glows warm like it does whenever Bucky remembers things unprompted. “Getting you up was always a chore.”

“Don’t know why you put up with me.”

“Must’ve been your good looks,” Steve teases, though the words trip off his tongue hesitantly. The little bundle of nerves he didn't realize was knotted in his belly loosens and dissolves when Bucky laughs and shakes his head.

“You are so full of it, Rogers.”

When they get down into the valley they get gas, Steve not-so-subtly checking out Bucky’s ass as he heads inside to pay. They end up in a Denny’s, a mountain of breakfast food between them, the carafe of coffee left because Bucky had insisted and because, memories or not, Bucky is still pretty good at charming the gals when he needs to. It’s the best meal that Steve’s had in a long time, and he’s not sure if it has to do with Bucky’s foot hooked around his ankle or the fact that Bucky is even _here,_ looking at Steve over his bacon and smiling with tired eyes hidden behind loose strands of hair.

It’s probably both, Steve reasons, reaching over and stealing a piece of bacon just for Bucky’s indignant noise. Yeah. It’s both.

——

Steve feels a little skeezy, going to a run-down dump like this one, nestled in the dark corner of a parking lot with its neon sign blinking in the twilight, halogen buzzing and jumping as they park and walk inside. Bucky holds his backpack close, unwilling to leave it in the backseat of the car. Steve still doesn't know what’s in it but he’ll always let Bucky do anything, no questions asked.

He rings the bell at the grimy counter and a portly, balding man who looks to be in his mid-forties appears. He’s wearing glasses that are thin and wire-framed, straight from the seventies. When Steve asks for one room the guy raises his brows, his dark, hooded eyes flickering from Steve to Bucky back to Steve again. The corner of his lip curls in a way that makes Steve’s blood boil.

“Just one room?” he asks, too casual.

“Just one,” Steve repeats.

The guy glances between them again, and Steve has to fight down the quick flare of anger inside him as the second go-over has Bucky hunching in on himself slightly, hands clutching his backpack a little closer to his chest.

“Your friend looks a little nervous,” the guy says as turns towards the keys resting in their nooks. He lets his fingers brush over a few of them, the metal clinking together, before he’s grabbing one. “Don’t worry,” he adds, turning around, “no missus is gonna find out what goes on here.”

Even though Steve glares at him the guy still says, “Enjoy your stay,” in a voice that drips with suggestion.

The motel room key given to them is beige, with peeling gold letters and a small chip in the plastic near the key ring.

Steve snatches the key out of his hand and leaves the money on the counter, elbows Bucky when Bucky just snorts, all composure collected again, as they walk out the door and down the sidewalk to their room. The stucco is cracked in places, the windowsills looking worse for wear. The inside, when Steve puts the key in the rusty lock and turns it, isn’t much better: one bed with drab sheets; an old television set, bulky on a chipped dresser. The carpet is brown and the curtains are tan and the wallpaper is old faded art deco.

Steve loves it.

Bucky takes off his jacket, then his shirt. Steve stares: at the muscled expanse of Bucky’s body, so different from what Steve remembers before and during the war; at the firework of scars branching out from his shoulder, the glint of metal a severe contrast to the soft ivory of Bucky’s skin; at Bucky, looking intent as he crosses the room and takes Steve’s face in his hands, scanning him with the kind of intensity that Steve has seen on the Soldier, before kissing the breath out of him, his lips plush and sweet and like home.

This culmination has been a long time coming, one that Steve could see a mile away but wasn't sure how fast it was going. And now that it’s here Steve’s letting himself be pulled under the riptide, letting himself drown in the heat of Bucky’s mouth and the hard press of his body. In his breathing, in the fleeting touches of his fingertips and the brief hesitance that crosses his eyes. It goes from zero to sixty in an instant and Steve has to dig his heels in just to stay grounded.

They both tug at Steve’s shirt until it’s gone, Bucky’s hands working at his buckle and zipper, metal clinking loud mingled with their harsh breaths. Then Steve’s, dexterous but impatient, as they fall back onto the sheets. Steve licks and sucks at Bucky’s lower lip as scoots up the bed, Bucky with one knee on and one foot still on the floor. He works his jeans down his legs, then off, swallows Bucky’s desperate moan when he pulls him up and shoves his hand down the front of Bucky’s underwear.

The bed creaks and Bucky pants loudly into his ear, biting down hard on Steve’s neck. Steve moans Bucky’s name and grips him a little tighter, keens out something that resembles _want you to fuck me,_ but isn’t sure because Bucky is on top of him and he’s so hard that he aches with it. So hard that pleasure is all he feels, a layer bubbling just under the surface of his skin and scratching to get out. Feral, animalistic, a primal urge that Steve is helpless to.

And he gasps it again, “ _Fuck me_ ,” and tugs at Bucky’s hair, kisses him with swollen lips. Shivers through the pounding rush and nuzzles at the soft underside of Bucky’s chin. “Want your cock in me. Want to feel you.”

And his face is burning, words tumbling out of his mouth unhindered, all those thoughts that he’s always been too shy to voice. The dam has finally broken and all Steve wants is _more,_ selfish desire and the urgency to take _._

Bucky snarls against Steve’s neck; the sound of fabric rendering is loud in the air as he rips Steve’s underwear off of him, smooth as anything, and throws them across the room. It makes Steve tremble, that power, and he kisses Bucky, grabs at his back, the cool metal plates of his arm. Lets himself rock in the eddies of lust and love.

“Fuck,” Steve gasps, shoving Bucky’s underwear down until they’re both naked and pressed close, hand on Bucky’s ass to get him as close as he can, fingers slipping between Bucky’s cheeks just to feel him shudder. The slide of his cock against Steve’s is anticipated but sudden, still leaves Steve whining and trying to arch up for more. “Fuck, Bucky.”

“Yeah,” Bucky breathes, grabbing Steve’s thigh and hitching it up over his hip. He props himself up, stares down at Steve with hair hanging his his eyes and cheeks flushed. He looks gorgeous, unhindered. Let loose and so in love. Bucky sucks his lower lip into his mouth and Steve’s eyes follow it. He lifts a hand, presses the pad of his thumb to gently draw it loose, and Bucky closes his eyes, lets his tongue brush the tip before Steve is letting his hand drop. “Shit—Steve, _yeah_.”

He spits into his palm, wraps it around his cock, then Steve’s, and when he starts to move Steve doesn't try to hold back his desperate moan. It’s fast and rough and just the right kind of filthy: the kind that makes higher brain function fizzle out, leaves everything feeling smoky and singed raw. Bucky’s lip curling as he pants and tosses his head back, skin slick with sweat, cock swollen red-purple and glistening slick where it slides in and out of his fist. Steve’s back arching, heel digging into Bucky’s ass. Feeling like his seams are coming unstitched, gasps shallow, nothing more than _ah ah ah_ as the head of Bucky’s cock drags over the sensitive seam under the head of Steve’s.

He’s breathing out, “Yeah, yeah,” as he rolls his hips and shudders. “God—Buck, c’mere—” And he’s kissing Bucky, hands on his jaw. He’s kissing Bucky and it’s like nothing else in the world matters, tunnel vision narrowed down to the way Bucky’s teeth are sharp in Steve’s lip and his tongue is velvet where it slips into his mouth. The way he groans low, quiet, breathes out Steve’s name as he shifts angles and takes control of the kiss, their noses bumping together and his hair ticklish against Steve’s face.

Steve comes first, then Bucky with a low, wounded cry as his spine curves and semen splatters warm on Steve’s heaving belly. Bucky rolls over and for a long moment neither says anything, content to just be. Steve’s just happy to be able to soak in Bucky’s company unhurried like this; when he looks over Bucky’s eyes are closed, lips slightly parted. He thinks he’s asleep for all of five seconds before Bucky is saying, “I can feel you staring at me,” and Steve laughs.

“Hard not to,” he says, slipping his eyes closed as well. “You look too good.”

“Yeah?”

Steve hums his affirmation, and the hum turns into a squeak of surprise as Bucky rolls back onto him. He opens his eyes, then, looks into Bucky’s and counts the lines from the crow’s feet as Bucky grins, soft and intimate and teasing.

“Think you look better,” he drawls, raising himself up on his arms. Steve appreciates the flex of muscle. Bucky’s eyes rove over his chest, the drying lines of come and the faint sheen of sweat. He wets his lips and Steve greedily follows the pink flash of his tongue. “Fuck. You always look better, who am I kidding?”

Steve laughs again and this time, Bucky is the one to kiss it away.

——

There’s silence now where there used to be chatter, Bucky talking about one thing or another with a kind of endearing fervor that Steve’s always admired. He can still a charm a room with just his words, but the instances come less frequently. Now people tend to avoid him, which Steve is pretty sure Bucky is fine with.

Steve knows the silences and understands them. They’re comfortable enough. Sometimes Bucky is okay, and other times he withdraws within himself, face shuttering closed and eyes going blank. Steve hates those times. They’d run across the country to try and escape any reason for Bucky to close off again, but running away doesn’t always mean you actually get anywhere.

Like now, sometime in the dead of night. The clock tells Steve that it’s three in the morning, but he doesn’t concentrate on that. You think, instead, about when you first saw him, filthy and terrified but knowing, impossibly, who you were. You think about that fear and how all you'd wanted was to dispel it in any way you could. How you'd both stared, silent, wondering if it was really happening.

“Hey,” Steve murmurs, sinking down across from where Bucky is hunched against the wall of their motel room. He’s careful to keep his distance, sitting cross-legged a few feet from him. Bucky’s head is down, fingers laced together on the back of it and shoulders moving with his jerky breaths. The lone lamp casts a yellowish glow over the room.

Steve expects the silence. Doesn’t press when he receives nothing in response. Take your time, it’s okay. There’s no rush. There’s no reason.

Finally, long enough later that Steve’s legs are going numb, Bucky looks up. The haunted, hollow look in his eyes makes Steve’s stomach flip, but he holds Bucky’s gaze steadily, offers a small smile and a cock of his head. The firm set of Bucky’s mouth loosens slightly, but his breathing is still on the heavy side.

“You’re okay,” Steve says, quietly.

He never asks what’s going on in Bucky’s head, because that’s what they tried to do back home when they’d wanted more experiments; to perhaps, somehow, keep Bucky as their own weapon. Making the mistake of trying to reactivate the Soldier and not understanding that Bucky isn’t that—was _never_ that, even through the torture and conditioning. You can put a suit on someone and tell them what to say, but it won’t change who they are inside.

Bucky closes his eyes and ducks his head back down, wrapping his arms around his knees.

“I wanted to die,” he whispers. Steve knows, but it doesn’t make it any easier. How Bucky had looked after going rogue, the way his voice sometimes still goes flat and how some mornings he never can get out of bed. “I just…I want the ghosts to shut up so bad, Stevie.”

“I know,” says Steve. “Buck, I know.”

"You're..." He takes a deep breath, clasps his hands tighter around his knees. "If it wasn't for you..."

He trails off again, but he doesn't need to finish the sentence for Steve to know what he means. He blinks away tears and says, “Say it with me, Bucky. I’m okay.”

Bucky’s forehead creases like he’s in pain, but he still says, in a rough voice, “I’m okay.”

“I’m safe.”

“I’m safe.”

Outside a car grumbles to life. The clock ticks. They breathe and the world turns and they are safe.

“How are you?”

The pause is longer, but Bucky meets Steve’s eyes when he says, “Better.”

Relief is heavy on Steve’s next exhale, and when he holds out his arms Bucky comes readily closer, folding himself into Steve's embrace like his bulk his nothing. Steve’s willing to stay here as long as it takes, and with Bucky in his arms, breathing finally slowing down, he figures that if it takes forever he’d be fine with that, too.

——

Sitting on the hood of the car, Steve still can’t get over the stars: how many they are, how they stretch out above them endlessly, unhindered by light or skyscrapers. He’d grown up wondering what it was like to look up at night and be able to clearly see the sky. And his time in the war, in foxholes and trenches in the heart of battle, had given him his first taste. Now he knows that it makes him feel small, reminding him that the vastness out there is so much greater than anything that he has ever dealt with. It reminds him of the unchanging nature of the universe. That these stars are the same ones he’d seen back in 1945.

The car is parked on the edge of the cliff again, off but for the radio, out of which lilts _“dancing in the moonlight, everybody’s feeling warm and bright.”_ Bucky stands a few feet away, thin hoodie on against the night chill. The cherry of his cigarette glows as he takes one last drag, drops it, exhales, and looks back.

Steve jumps off and grabs him, then, pulls him close and kisses the laughter off of Bucky’s lips, craves the smile stretched against his own with a yearning that tugs fiercely at his heart. He loves catching Bucky off-guard for this reason, the way that he flails for a second before giving in, pliant in Steve's arms. Trusting him in a way that he trusts nobody else.

“What’s this about?” Bucky asks, and his eyes are bright in the silver light, hair falling loose over his forehead from the wind.

“Dance with me,” Steve says, hands straying to anchor at Bucky’s hips. His thumbs smooth over the soft cotton of Bucky’s shirt, pressing into firm muscle beneath, and a fine tremor runs up Bucky’s body.

“You don’t dance,” says Bucky, lips quirking with what Steve knows is an unsaid memory: a dance hall, probably, Bucky with a dame on each arm and Steve uncomfortable off to the side with a glass of gin and tonic.

“Yeah, well,” Steve says, sliding a hand around to palm at Bucky’s back, dragging him closer, “things change. And there’s no one to judge me except for you.”

Bucky’s loud laugh echoes along the dusty brush. Steve imagines it carrying down to the city below, getting wrapped up and lost in the sounds of thousands of people living their lives. "Bad choice, pal. Judging you has always been my favorite thing to do."  


Bucky is just as good as he was back then, hands around Steve’s waist when Steve slides his up to loop loosely around Bucky’s neck. The smirk on his lips is the same cocksure one he’d give to the dames, and Steve feels his knees weaken because of it.

There’s no real cadence behind their steps, no real rhythm to the swaying of their bodies as King Harvest comes to a close and Blue Oyster Cult picks up in the brief silence. There is only intimacy, the close press of their bodies, chest-to-chest and heart-to-heart. Bucky tucks his face into Steve’s neck and Steve cards his fingers through Bucky’s hair.

The world around them melts away, molting its glittering modern brilliance to show the beige of before, the smoky dance halls and the drab off-white of their old apartment. Steve can almost imagine hearing the brassy bleat of the live band and wonders what it would have been like if his stares hadn’t had to stay longing as he watched Bucky twirl girls on the dance floor.

“How are you?” he murmurs finally, their tradition as each day ticks to an end.

Against him, Bucky’s heart pounds. Against him, Bucky is alive and real. His hands clutch at Steve’s back, metal firm against Steve’s shoulder blade, and it’s a few moments before he breathes out, “Better.”

Steve kisses the top of Bucky’s head and leads them to the car. There they rest, Bucky tucked up against Steve’s body, as _“I’m burnin’, I’m burnin’, I’m burnin’ for you”_ bleeds out into the night.

——

The days move slow, unhindered. The sun rises and the sun sets but time has no place here in their world. They relearn things they’d forgotten and learn new things they hadn’t known. Steve grows used to the catch in his breath and heart when Bucky smiles at him. He grows used to the solid line of Bucky stretched out against him at night, at the way his fingers feel between Steve’s when they walk along the boardwalk and through the hot sand of the beach. The way Bucky can barter with the elderly Japanese man selling seafood and the young Hispanic woman selling fruit.

He grows used to the quick smiles, the flashes of smirks that look more dangerous with Bucky’s dark eyes, and how he eats the fruit he buys—mangoes and peaches and apples—slowly as they walk, one eye on Steve the entire time.

Steve learns what it’s like to kiss Bucky with the taste of salt from the ocean on his lips. How the blue of the sky and the blue of the water bring out the gray in Bucky’s eyes. He relearns the loud, breezy way that Bucky laughs when he’s truly happy.

They aren’t running. Not anymore. It’s hard to build a new life, and you’ll get some callouses doing it, some blisters and aching backs and some arguments. But the end result is worth it when you stand back and admire knowing what it looked like before.

They’ll go back eventually. This Steve knows. He wasn’t kidding about Brooklyn being in their veins, and D.C. now holds nothing more than the fly-infested carrion of Steve’s hopes for a new life. But what he wants more than that is the smile back on Bucky’s face. Because Bucky tries—god, he does, with a fierce tenacity that both breaks and livens Steve’s heart—but trying isn’t always enough.

They’d come out of everything with their share of cuts and bruises, and Steve would never act like his trials were worse than anyone else’s. Especially when Bucky’s chase him with the ferocity of attack dogs, hellhounds hot in his trail no matter where he goes.

It’s a lazy day, as far as their time in California has been. Steve had woken with an aimless sort of his ache in his belly and one look at Bucky had shown that he’d felt the same. So they’ve been content making the room theirs for the day, flipping mindlessly between channels and getting each other off with lazy, hedonistic indulgence. Steve grows addicted to the way Bucky looks in the dingy light, straddling Steve’s hips with his head thrown back and upper lip curled as his fast panting turns into low, stretched-out groans, the sheets a tangled mess around their legs. He falls asleep around one, head pillow on Steve’s chest. Steve partially watches the home renovation show on TV and mostly watches the steady rise and fall of Bucky’s shoulders.

You take things for granted, even when you don’t intend to. For most of his life Bucky had been there: through skinned knees and swollen jaws and bloody lips, through colds and respiratory infections and TB scares, Steve had never imagined a second of his life without Bucky’s quick wit and dry humor and steady, careful hands. You wake up and they’re there; you go to sleep and they’re there. You listen to their breathing from the close confines of an old twin bed and you’re grateful, you are, but you expect their presence when you close your eyes and when you open them.

And then they’re not there and your whole world stops turning. You look up from the carnage and wonder how people can keep moving when it feels like your entire life has splintered into pieces. You wonder if guilt can eat you alive and you wonder if you should feed it your heart first, just so it’ll stop hurting.

For once, Steve wants to be selfish.

And when he wakes up, blinking slow like a cat in the light, long hair tangled and stubble dark on his face, Steve’s heart surges in his chest.

——

“What is this?” he asks later that night when Bucky wordlessly hands him a notebook. Its cover is battered, one of the edges torn, but the pages inside are neat, meticulous, filled with the spidery scrawl of Bucky’s handwriting and crisscrossed here and there with jagged black lines and scribbled out sentences. It has the look of something that has been through a lot but has been well taken care of.

Bucky looks everywhere but Steve’s face, and when he does he has the caged, cornered look that he’d had when Steve had found him again. A knife twists white-hot in Steve’s gut, and he considers dropping the notebook altogether. There are doors he hasn’t opened through all of this, and now that the knob is in his hands he almost wants to walk away. But he can’t, not when Bucky has handed him the key.

“This from your backpack?” he asks instead.

Bucky nods, and that’s what makes Steve decide to keep holding onto it. He’s never asked what Bucky carries in his backpack, and Bucky has never divulged; a man needs his share of secrets, after all.

“It’s…my memories,” Bucky says. He sounds so young, scared. “Or, at least what I remember of them. I’ve kept notebooks ever since D.C. because I was…” A deep, uneven breath. “I was scared I’d lose them again.”

Steve’s face softens. He flips briefly through the pages, reads things like _Brooklyn_ and _winter of 1928_ and _I had sisters_. Sees instances like the back-alley fights and nickelodeons on weekends when they could afford them, sees the other bits and fragments of things that must make sense only to Bucky. The hard-to-read things like the names of victims, how they died. His vague recollections of the conditioning and experiments and the names of the doctors who did it. The first time he’d gone rogue, running to New York even though he had no idea why.

Steve skims each entry, hands trembling, feeling like he’s holding a quivering piece of Bucky’s live flesh in his hands and half-expecting to see his fingers come away dripping blood. There is fear in these pages, almost as palpable as the paper itself. Fear of his past, fear that these snatches could float away again before they could become full-fledged memories. Fear of the future and what he is to become. The sound of flipping pages is loud in the silence, over and over, until one particular passes catches Steve’s eye.

_I fell. Steve watched, but he never fell with me._

The weight of it slaps Steve in the face, nearly sending him reeling. He’s carried this with him ever since he’d woken up, this guilt, and it had redoubled after the Winter Soldier had turned out to be slightly less than a ghost story and Steve was suddenly seeing the face he thought he’d only ever see again in grainy photos and video.

He’s spent so much of his life sacrificing things for the greater good. Spent so much time being selfless to the point of carelessness and sacrifice. Bucky had been there through most of them, always ready to pick up the pieces. To save Steve’s life. And the one time that Bucky had needed him…

“I regret never going after you when you fell.” The words stick in Steve’s throat, form a heavy mass that makes it hard to swallow. It’s something that he’s only ever admitted to Peggy, and even then it hadn’t been more than scratching the surface. Desperately drinking bottle after bottle, searching a release that he’d never feel again. Closing his eyes and seeing Bucky fall, not brave enough to try to see where, not brave enough to try and find him. The look of horror on his face and the fading echo of his voice. “Jesus. Bucky…”

Regret has a way of corroding your mind and wasting your body. It latches onto your bones, leeches into your system, and burrows its way into your capillaries and into your heart. It becomes a permanent parasite in your mind, a _what if_ that crosses every so often. _What if he had fallen with Bucky? What if he had gone to look for his body? What if Erskine hadn't chosen him and he hadn't become Captain America? Who would have saved Bucky then?_

“Don’t,” Bucky says. “Steve, don’t.”

Steve doesn't realize he’s crying until Bucky stands up from the bed and walks over to him, taking Steve’s wrists and dropping the notebook to the floor.

“Don’t,” Bucky says again, quieter. Steve is struggling to pull in breaths, and he wonders if maybe everything had been an illusion: if he’s been dreaming these last few years and he’s lying sickly in his bed back in Brooklyn, Bucky hovering over him with a cool cloth on his forehead. His chest sure rattles like it did back then.

“I’m here,” says Bucky. His arms are strong around Steve’s shoulders. “Okay? I’m here and I don’t blame you for a goddamn thing.”

Steve hugs Bucky back fiercely, feeling flesh and metal and bone and letting himself unravel from unreality. Settles back into his skin and bones and shoes, takes deep breaths until he can smell Bucky’s aftershave and cigarette smoke and chewing gum. It’s okay.

“How are you?” Bucky asks after an undetermined amount of time.  
  
Steve laughs wetly, turns to tuck his face in the crook of Bucky’s neck. “You can’t turn my thing against me.”

“I can and I will. Just try and stop me, Rogers.”

Steve is too weak to fight back, and maybe, truthfully, he doesn’t want to anymore; he’s spent so much time fighting. So all he does is pull Bucky closer, hand between his shoulder blades and low on his back, and whisper, “Better,” into Bucky’s collar. “Better now that you’re here.”

——

Mornings mean quick blowjobs in bed, Bucky’s legs over Steve’s shoulders. Mornings mean Bucky’s sleep-rough moans and soft sighs of Steve’s name as he comes, then his gentle encouragements as Steve gets himself off, shuddering against Bucky’s body. Mornings mean not much at all, tangled in the cheap motel sheets and listening to each other’s breathing.

Mornings mean steaming coffee at seaside restaurants and Bucky kissing the taste of jam off of Steve’s lips. Memorizing the single strand of hair that falls errant onto Bucky’s forehead when he’s pushed his hair back with his sunglasses and counting the lines around his eyes and the ones above his brows. He is here, for good this time, but Steve can’t help feeling like he could be taken away any moment.

Holding Bucky’s hand, Steve marvels at the unnaturalness of it: the smooth metal of his palm, the ridges of the plates and how they shift like snakeskin and whir faintly when Bucky moves his fingers. It looks so benign, but Steve would be hard-pressed to forget the way it had slammed into concrete and pushed the point of a knife through aluminum. How it had sounded when Bucky had revved it up, eyes cold and dead and determined.

He must look pensive, because Bucky is saying his name, eyebrow raised. And Steve, never one to know when to hold his tongue, asks, “I was just. I was wondering how it…how it felt.”

Bucky stares, then says, “The arm?”

Steve nods and worries his lip. He squeezes Bucky’s hand and Bucky squeezes back, rubbing his thumb over Steve’s hand. “It feels like an arm. I don’t notice it much anymore, I guess. I can…feel things, in a sense. Pressure, mostly. Nothin’ special.”

“You don’t like talking about it.”

Bucky looks at Steve out of the corner of his eye, curves the corners of his lips up. “Can’t say that I love the thing, but there’s nothing I can do about it now. Just gotta learn to live with it.”

Steve stares at the red star on Bucky’s shoulder and wonders what it’d be like to paint over it, or at least change its appearance. Bucky was never that person, was never truly that symbol, and he doesn’t deserve to carry it with him for the rest of his life.

——

And, later, Steve’s back against the cool hood of the car, his vision nothing but the wide velvet swatch of the sky. His body nothing but liquid filled to fit a container, sloshing and churning as heat blooms low in his belly and explodes like a firework.

Bucky is there, hair hanging loose in his eyes, cheeks flushed red, a laugh frozen on his face in the pale silver of the light. Looking beautiful and radiant and happy and Steve is so goddamn _in love._ And then he’s pushing into Steve slowly, taking his time until Steve feels half-mad with impatience, grabbing at Bucky’s back and groaning out breathy puffs of air that get lost to the mountains, begging for more and harder in a thin, high voice that can’t be his but _is_ , somehow.

He is scaturient with pleasure, so full of it he feels he may burst at any second. Bucky’s thrusts are slow and measured, purposeful in their intent to drive deep and press just right, and though he makes the control look easy Steve can see the way Bucky’s arms tremble, the way his eyes have grown dark and sweat has begun to bead at his temples.

“Oh,” Steve gasps; then again, like it’s all he knows how to say. Bucky looking down at him, focused, intense, drinking in Steve like he’s the best thing in the world. “Ventura Highway” playing on the radio, drowning out Steve’s quiet moans as Bucky fucks him unhurried and deep. Steel groans and pops under Steve's back but the drive of Bucky's cock in him is more important: fast and thick and pressing just right, just at that angle to make Steve whine in ways that he's never whined before.

Steve kisses him, fingers tangled in Bucky’s hair to tug, direct the kiss, even as Bucky’s thrusts grow quicker and draw out grunts on the end of each breath. Steve comes with his hand on his cock, back arching up off the hood of the car, and coaxes Bucky over with him with a low, near-purred, “C’mon, come in me, _like that—”_

Bucky moans out a laugh as his hips stutter. He trembles with his orgasm, lets out a low whining breath as his cock jerks. Steve strokes down the sweaty back of his neck. “What?”

“It’s just.” Bucky pauses for a moment. “I remember hearing this song when I was on a mission in ’72—I think.” Bucky remembers things sometimes, random bits and pieces that never really make sense. “And, I don’t know. It’s just stuck with me for some reason.” He leans low to Steve’s ear, dropping to his elbows, and begins to sing in a rusty voice. _“Even though we ain’t got money, I’m so in love with you honey. Everything will bring a chain of love.”_

Steve shoves at him, laughing, saying, “You still can’t carry a damn tune,” but Bucky is relentless, laughing, too, and breathing the chorus of the song in Steve’s ear until tears prick Steve’s eyes and he’s grabbing at Bucky’s face, fingers hooked in the curve of his jaw, to kiss him, open and soulful like the words spilling out into the night. Steve imagines that he’s cracked open, emotions spilling out along with them.

“I love you,” Steve breathes, lost syllables in the slick slide of lips, the hungry sound as they part and come back. He feels a little crazed right now, but no one ever said that being in love was sane. “God, I fucking love you so much.”

Saying it out loud, in words, is like being swept away in a hurricane. Bucky is his home, his universe, the stars above him and the earth beneath his feet. They’ve been running away from home even though home has followed them, burrowed into their skin and connecting them with an invisible pull. After the ice, the Avengers had been all that Steve had had, and he’d latched onto them with lost desperation. Thrust into a world where everyone he knew was dead, where his old haunts have all been bulldozed or renovated and his neighborhood holds little more than sentimental value, he’d wanted any sort of support system. But they’ve never been home. Home has always been Bucky, and thousands of miles away it’s never rang truer.

He isn’t worried about Bucky’s response, doesn’t breathe out in relief when Bucky says, voice wrecked, “I love you, too,” because he’s always known. They’ve never had to say anything before, had never wanted to. _I love the way you look at me. I love the way you hold me. I love how I can always catch you look at me out of the corner of my eye and how you’ll blush and look away even though you don’t need to._

Things change. Years pass, the dead come back from the grave. You run away for the first time in your life and you enjoy every second of it. You know how he looks silhouetted in the dying California sun, board shorts on and shirt off as he walks down the beach, the waves lapping their foamy breath at his thin ankles. You know that his rapture looks the same as his pain sometimes, the two tied together so tightly that they blend too easily.

You know that you’re always going to choose him. Turn the hourglass upside down, let the sands run backwards, put you in your sickly body back in your Brooklyn flop, no family, just Bucky, and you’d choose Bucky again in a heartbeat.

You know what it’s like to dance with him, to be the one who turns on the lights to chase away the demons squalling at the door. To save his life, day after day. And you know that he’d do all of that and more.

You’re in love with him and he’s in love with you. Suddenly the stars and the moon don’t matter, because he is your universe and everything else seems so small.

——

Your skin isn’t so pale anymore, and neither is his. The circles under his eyes are still dark, but there’s a light to them now that offsets it. There are still nightmares, the constant worry that they’re being tailed. There is still the uncertainty of the future and what will happen to them once they return. But Steve will just clutch Bucky’s hand tighter, stand shoulder-to-shoulder, the way that he knows best. 

You think about life together outside a motel room. An apartment. Furniture. A kitchen. Privacy. California is beautiful, but it isn’t home, not in the way that you both want it to be. It’s an escape, a filler chapter used to move the story along. You think about that apartment, walking to the bodegas in the mornings and to the parks in the afternoons. Slipping effortlessly into anonymous city life the best way that you can.

Bucky is driving, window open a crack as he taps the end of his cigarette to dispel the ash. Steve’s feet are up on the dash, long legs folded uncomfortably, but he doesn’t want to move, not yet. He’s watching Bucky drive, taking in how his hair has gotten longer, brushing the tops of his shoulders now. The curve of his bicep under the thin cotton of his sleeve. How he wets his lips after every drag and taps his thumb on the steering wheel.

You can’t run from who you are, but you sure as hell can prove that you’re more than just a costume. That he is more than a shadow and the scope of a rifle.

He looks over and you look over.

“How are you?” Steve asks.

It doesn’t take long for him to cotton on. Their little Nova steadfast as it advances along the twists and turns of the road. The radio humming low in the background, snippets of Jackson Browne singing about somebody’s baby.

“I’m ready to go home,” replies Bucky, tossing the butt of his cigarette out the window and rolling it up with quick, effortless cranks. Off to the side the sun is blood-orange, and the sea glitters diamonds. You love it, but you won’t really miss it.

Steve smiles, leans across the front seat and takes Bucky’s hand. “Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr is [here](http://endofadream.tumblr.com) if, y'know, you're into that sort of thing. reviews appreciated!


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